COMS 6998-004 Network Theory

Call Number 77149

Fall 2010

Wednesdays 6:10-8 PM

325 Pupin Terrace

Dragomir R. Radev

Goal of the course

To allow graduate students to catch up with recent developments in
network theory, focusing on existing networks such as the web and
protein interaction networks and the methods and algorithms for
analysing them.

Brief description

The course is about naturally occurring networks such as the Web,
social networks, citation networks, protein interaction networks,
lexical networks, movie actors, etc. The course will cover the
mathematical and computational models that explain the behavior of
these networks. Specific topics include random graphs, small worlds,
scale-free networks, random walks and harmonic functions, spectral
methods, descriptive analysis of networks, information diffusion and
learning on graphs, etc.

Textbook

Networks by Mark Newman

Format

The class will meet once a week for 2 hours in order for MS students
to be able to attend regularly.
The students will be responsible for summarizing papers, 3
assignments, including a final project, and a final exam.

Final project

An open-ended research project in one of two categories:

Research paper - using the SIGIR format. Students will be
in charge of problem formulation, literature survey, hypothesis
formulation, experimental design, implementation, and possibly
submission to a conference like SIGIR, Sunbelt, ICWSM, or WWW.

Software system - develop a working, useful system (including an
API). Students will be responsible for identifying a niche problem,
implementing it and deploying it, either on the Web or as an
open-source downloadable tool.

Instructor

Dragomir R. Radev obtained a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia in
1999. He is currently a professor at the University of Michigan with a
joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science and the School of Information. He has taught numerous
courses in Natural Language Processing, Databases, and Information
Retrieval. He has received a number of awards including the Columbia
CS department award for graduate student teaching, the University of
Michigan UROP award for outstanding research mentorship, as well as
the Gosnell Prize for excellence in political methodology. As
undergraduate he has been on a team that finished in the top 10 at the
ACM international computer programming contest and, later, has been
the coach of Columbia's team for 4 years, taking it to three
international finals. Dragomir has worked in different capacities for
places like Microsoft Research, IBM Research, MITRE, AT&T Bell
Labs, and Yahoo! He is also an ACM Distinguished Scientist.